If you’re looking at your desktop computer screen, laptop screen for a long time, then your eyes may get strained. It is caused by decreased blinking while working long hours focusing on computer screens. Staring at your computer screen, subject your eyes to blue light coming from screen. Due to strained eyes, there may be burning sensation in your eyes, headache, blurred vision, Computer Vision Syndrome, color fringes, afterimages and difficulty in refocusing and similar problems. Your sleep pattern may also get disturbed.

There are some software which it reduces the harmful effects of blue light coming from your computer screen. Most of these software works either by dimming the screen brightness or changing the colour temperature of the computer/laptop monitor screen, automatically. These software adjust the screen to best monitor brightness and contrast settings for eyes.

And here are five best software to protect eyes from the computer screen glare:

1. F.Lux

This is the oldest, free and by far the best software to protect your eyes from your computer screen. You just need to provide your location and the rest will be handled by the software automatically. You can manually feed your location too. By knowing the location, it knows the daytime duration. It adjust screen brightness and colour settings according to the daytime. For example, in the evening the colour of your screen is yellowish and in the noon time, it is white. You can change the intensity of the colours manually, too.

It is also light on computer resources (just 0.5 MB installation file). You can also turn it off temporarily when working in colour sensitive environment.

2. Shades

Shades is also a free utility for controlling the brightness of your laptop screen. But it is only available for Mac operating system. Shades runs in the background providing always available fine grained control over the brightness of your display via a slick Mac-like interface.There is a colour palette to choose colour for your screen tint.

3. Pangobright

Pangobright controls the brightness of your computer screen. It dims the lights of your laptop screen based on your preferences. It is also a very light utility (just 0.1 MB installation file). Pangobright sits in the System Tray at the lower right corner of the screen. It works with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

4. Calise

Calise which is acronym for “camera light sensor”, is a Free/Open Source program that calculates ambient brightness through Webcam and adjust your computer screen brightness accordingly. It takes a snapshot of light condition from webcam and analyse it to find average brightness of environment. And then returns the correct screen brightness level to use. It also has a “movement control” feature that avoids (within a certain range) any “user in front of the camera” movements resulting in an unwanted computer screen brightness change.

It works only on Linux and available for its every desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, … and also non-X).

5. EyePro

This is not a pure computer brightness changing software, but it remind the user to take a short break. Taking a short break while staring at a computer screen for a long duration, also protect your eyes from harmful effect of computer screen. And this software just to remind you of that break from time to time as per your preferences. This is for everyone who spent more than two hours consecutively on computer screen like employees with computer related job environment, students, computer professionals.

This is an open source software. This software won’t let you to forget about taking breaks.

Like EyePro, there are similar software which remind you to take a break:

6. Awareness

As the name suggest, it aware you of the time spent on computer screen. It plays the sound of a Tibetan singing bowl to mark every hour of continuous computer use. It also displays the time period for which you’ve been using your computer without a break in the menu bar. Awareness is available for Windows as well as Mac.

7. EyeLeo

EyeLeo is a handy PC application that reminds you to take a short break for your eyes. The best part of this software is that it tell you about some simple eye exercises to reduce strain on your eyes. It also has a strict mode which doesn’t allow you to skip the break.

8. Protect Your Vision

Protect Your Vision is an extension to your web browser which remind you to take a short break. It is available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari web browser. It had two inbuilt recommendations:

Take a 20 second break every 20 minutes of work by focusing on an object 20 feet away (20-20-20) or